Here’s how you can make your benefits administration strategy work smarter and harder for your organization by infusing artificial intelligence into your tech stack.
The annual enrollment season hits HR professionals hard every year: Thousands of questions flood in, employees struggle to understand their options, and HR is working under mounting pressure to stabilize costs and keep employees happy.
But what if your team had more support without the added cost of headcount? That’s where artificial intelligence—or adaptive intelligence as we like to call it—comes in.
Hang on—don’t scroll away. This isn’t a blog about how AI is going to replace HR (it isn’t and we don’t want it to).
AI can do powerful things for your organization like:
- Field immediate employee questions that overwhelm your team (e.g., what’s my deductible?)
- Responding at all hours with direct answers and reducing unnecessary emails or messages
- Making it easier for your employees to understand and use their benefits
- Allows you and your team to be more strategic and stay focused on more complex challenges
Annual enrollment should be a kick-off event for the upcoming plan year, not a season where you’re just barely surviving in the flood of questions, emails, file feeds, and finances.
Considering bringing AI into your organization? Here’s what we recommend asking while you’re evaluating technology.
HR’s AI buyer’s guide: 10 questions to ask in your RFP
How much of your team’s time is spent handling phone calls, emails, or other manual tasks that AI should be able to support?
For HR leaders evaluating how an investment in AI for benefits administration, the ROI conversation has shifted from theoretical to proven. If you are challenged with finding cost mitigation or savings opportunities, benefits administration is already being transformed by AI—the question is whether you’ll be among the early adopters who gain a cost competitive advantage or forced to play catch-up Consider these questions when reviewing your benefits administration technology:
How does the AI benefits assistant handle complex and multi-step questions?
- Can the benefits assistant make decisions based on context and multiple data sources, like plan documents and eligibility rules?
- What happens when the AI assistant doesn’t know the answer?
- Do you have confidence thresholds in place and a live-agent review process?
- Does the AI tool have memory throughout conversations to build a fulsome answer or is each message treated in isolation?
- How is the assistant trained and fed knowledge? Is it static, live data, or something else? How do you ensure accuracy and consistency?
- Can I customize the agent’s logic, workflows, and data sources?
- What analytics, insights, and dashboards are available to me to help monitor response success rates, issue trends, and cases? Is this available in real-time?
- How often is your team testing and QAing for accuracy and quality over time?
- What is your roadmap for making the assistant more agentic and autonomous over the next year?
- Can you provide examples, case studies, or live demos where the AI tools successfully resolved a real-world issue for HR and for an employee to prove its capabilities?
Ready to bring intuitive AI into your benefits administration strategy? Let’s chat.
How AI can transform your strategy from reactive to proactive
When AI is part of your benefits strategy as described in the questions above, you can expect results like this through your technology.
- 90% of benefits questions are resolved same day: AI agents can take on the bulk of benefits questions year-round. Sofia, Businessolver’s proprietary AI solution, uses a unique blend of empathy, agentic AI, and natural language processing to provide concierge-level service and support. Some of the most common questions Sofia supports include checking claim statuses, pulling up benefits documents, and simplifying healthcare jargon.
- 10 million minutes of HR’s time saved: Organizations using AI-powered benefits tools save nearly 10 million minutes annually in call and chat times—that’s over 7,700 hours that HR teams can redirect toward strategic initiatives. Instead of explaining the difference between HSAs and FSAs for the hundredth time, you’re designing wellness programs that actually move the needle.
- $3 million in cost avoidance with more efficiencies: For a company with 11,000 employees, AI-driven steerage to cost-effective health plans can save over $3 million in premium spend alone.
- 79% of employees feel confident in their elections: When AI helps personalize and simplify the entire benefits experience for employees, confidence and satisfaction soar—in spite of 86% of employees saying they’re totally confused about benefits.
- 18% lift in average benefits engagement: AI-powered personalization can make benefits up to five times more visible, ensuring employees actually use what you’re providing. When the benefits experience is tailored to each employee’s needs and health history, they’re more likely to engage with the right benefits at the right time.
The Future is Already Here
AI isn’t coming to benefits administration—it’s already here.
Your annual benefits enrollment season will always bring challenges. Healthcare costs will continue rising, employee expectations will keep evolving, and the complexity won’t disappear overnight. But with AI as your strategic partner, you can approach these challenges with confidence instead of dread.
Your employees are ready for this transformation—89% already opt to share data for personalized experiences, and engagement rates soar when the right tools are available. The technology exists, the business case is proven, and early adopters are already seeing remarkable results.
The only question left is: will you be ready for the enrollment season that changes everything?
